Location: Kuhsar, Iran

Design Team: ZAV Architects

Area: 200 m²

Year: 2025

Photography: Parham Taghioff, Persia Photography Center

Design Features: Gelareh House stands in Kuhsar, Alborz Province, Iran, where a weekend villa has been transformed into a 200 m² permanent home. The original building, designed by Iranian architect Firouz Firouz, was retained after the owners acquired three neighbouring orchard plots and sought more space for daily life. ZAV Architects approached the extension as a graft: new requirements enter the spatial and constructive logic of the existing villa, allowing new architectural limbs to grow outward into the orchard.

This growth neither copies the original form nor treats the additions as detached objects. The orthogonal geometry of the villa gradually develops into a connected system of curving vaults. They twist, overlap and slide past one another, decreasing in height as they move away from the original body. Like an articulated shell, the sequence occupies clearings between trees. The boundary between old and new is elusive at first, then becomes legible through shifts in scale, direction and movement.

Colour records the stages of this transformation. The concentrated warm tones of the original house extend into a spectrum of orange, pink, white and pale blue, giving each segment the character of a different moment in the building's evolution. The shells are more than a coloured envelope. Gaps at their overlaps admit light from above and along the walls, allowing a repeated construction to produce corridors, rooms and garden thresholds with distinct atmospheres.

The additions settle on treeless clearings while enclosing selected areas of orchard. As a result, the garden is no longer scenery viewed from indoors: tending, harvesting, walking and dwelling become part of the same domestic routine, and the trees participate in the organisation of space. The radial branches in plan show how rooms seek their own openings and courtyards, while the elevations and section clarify the gradual change in vault height, colour and daylight.

The project retains the material character and locally workable construction methods of the earlier villa, yet reinterprets them through a new geometry. Low-tech building does not narrow the spatial ambition; it makes curvature, thickness, colour and hand-worked surfaces directly perceptible at the scale of the body. Gelareh House ultimately replaces a sharp division between old and new with a slow transition from house to orchard and from solid colour to spectrum.

Design Team: ZAV Architects became an official Tehran-based architectural practice in 2006, founded by Mohamadreza Ghodousi and Parsa Ardam. After Ardam left the group in 2013, Fateme Rezaei Fakhr, Golnaz Bahrami and Sheila Ehsaei joined as partners, contributing to an open structure shaped by recurring collaboration with architects, researchers and specialists beyond the office.

The practice takes a research-driven and pragmatic approach, beginning with real conditions rather than a predetermined formal product. Spatial scenarios, programmes, typologies, craftsmanship and construction techniques are examined for the capacities they can activate. Architectural quality is not treated as separate from social and economic aims; materials, construction and spatial experience become the means through which those aims are made tangible.

At Gelareh House, lead architects Mohamadreza Ghodousi, Fatemeh Rezaei, Golnaz Bahrami, Mahmoud Ganji and Mahdi Rabei guided the design team. In 2026 the project received the Architizer A+Awards Popular Choice Winner in Architecture + Colour and a Special Mention in Residential Renovations & Additions, continuing the studio's sustained interest in local construction, collective practice and colour as spatial structure.